Guide to tackling nuisance or scam telephone calls and messages
Scam telephone calls and texts have increased significantly, reaching multi-year highs in 2025 with millions of malicious calls made daily. Reports indicate a surge in sophisticated "spoofing" tactics, where criminals mask numbers to appear as trusted organisations, with about 9.3% of UK calls being fraudulent.
In the UK, 42% of users reported receiving a suspicious call in a 3-month period, often targeting the elderly.
Phone Scams: Scammers use "spoofing" to mimic local or trusted numbers. Common scams include pretending to be bank officials, government agencies, or tech support. Victims in the UK lost an estimated £1.1 billion in 2023 to such scams.
Text Scams: Nearly 71% of people reported receiving a suspicious text message, with 44% receiving one at least weekly.
How to Protect Yourself:
- Do not answer: Avoid answering calls from unknown or international numbers.
- Hang up: If a call feels high-pressure or suspicious, immediately hang up.
- Report: Forward spam text messages to 7726.
- Verify independently: If a caller claims to be from your bank or a government agency, hang up and call them back using a trusted number from their official website.
Full advice on how to recognise and report emails, texts, websites, adverts or phone calls that you think are trying to scam you, Click Here
Their campaign on how important it is to report fraud can be found at the link below:
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